The British USA Colonialism Internalized by the
Native American Elias Boudinot in the Narrative
"An Address to the Whites"
Tania Gonzalez Marrufo MA Candidate
Hangzhou Normal University in English and American Literature Studies
Abstract:- Political and social tensions between the Native Americans and the United States over land divisions and occupation created violent relations of power among Natives, British and Americans. The British-American War following the independence of The United States of Europe leads to the publication of Native American narrative. However the narrative of Elias Boudinot portrays a colonialist discourse emulated by a Cherokee, this can be explained as an effect of the colonialism internalized by a sector of the Native Americans.
The intention of this paper is to analyze the psychology of colonialism in order to prove this ideological colonization. The reader will be able to see through this paper how colonialism is internalized by the colonized, and how, through the mechanism of oppression, the oppressed ends up emulating the ideology of his oppressors. My research uses theories of post-colonialism (Black Skin, White Masks of Franz Fanon) and Decolonial Latin American theories to analyze the effects of colonialism in the speech delivered by Elias Boudinot: "An Address to the Whites".
Keywords:- Native American, Elias Boudinot , Colonialism, Zone of non-being USA.
I. INTRODUCTION
The theory of Zone of Being and Zone of Non-Being (first introduced by Fanon later developed by decolonials scholars) analyzes the systematic approach through which a group or nation that claims superiority and defined “the other” according to its prejudices on superiority and privileges of race, class, sex, etc.
In this particular case the empowered group (USA) promotes a Native Narrative that defines Native Americans in their own voice but not as they really are but according to the USA-European perspective. Boaventura de Sousa Santos and scholars of the philosophy of liberation in America investigates the discourse surrounding knowledge of the South, revealing the resulting unequal power relationship which will make impossible that the oppressed expresses her or his real thoughts in the official arena.
The discourse of the oppressed that will be heard, read or published will be the one that reproduced the ideology of the oppressor. In defining the South in its own image, the North justified itself and affirm its dominance. In consequence the Native American narrative which we can have access to, it is a narrative delivered by the oppressed but that reproduces a colonialist discourse.
The intention of this paper is to analyze the psychology of colonialism in colonized Native Americans to understand how the oppressed ends up by emulating the ideology of his oppressors. However to understand colonialism it is important to learn about colony, so the first chapter of this paper will start by refreshing some historical facts of the Euro-American Colony in America, followed by an analysis on the colonialism prevalent in the speech of Elias Boudinot: “An Address to the Whites”, speech delivered on May 26, 1826. The last part will be a conclusion based on the reasons that create such a colonialist discourse: colonialism, zone of Being and zone of non-being.
II. EUROPE DIDN’T DISCOVER AMERICA BUT VIOLENTLY ATTACKED, COLONIZED AND
FINALLY DEFINED AMERICA
America was not discovered by the Spaniards in 1492. Approximately 35 or 40000 before from their arrival, other men and women from what we call now Asia arrived to America and legitimately occupied American lands from north to south. They were the first Native Americans. Due to the richness of the American Land and favorable weather conditions these first men and women quickly developed organized civilizations.
Most of the American civilizations by the arrival of the Europeans were as developed as the most developed ancient civilizations of the world (the Maya Culture for example it is famous for the discovery of the cero (among many other astronomical discoveries), they also knew that the earth is round.
the world. Arabic, Asian, American and African cultures were in a very different historical process, in the case of the Mesopotamian Arabic cultures and China the development was so incredible that by that time they had already made important discoveries for the humanity. The most developed ancient civilizations by the mid-end of the XV Century were the Chinese, Mesopotamian Arabic, American and African civilization.
The first great schools of mathematics and philosophy where the Greeks and later the Romans learnt which later will become” European knowledge” were actually Mesopotamian and African schools (Aristotle's writings on metaphysics and logic were studied in Baghdad well before they were translated into Latin in Muslim Spain (Andalucía was ruled by Muslim Caliphate until 1491. Here it is important to point out that very different from European conquerors in America, Muslims rulers didn't massacred or slave natives to convert them to their religion (the proof is that in Latin German Europe people is still Christian and speak Indo-European or Latin languages after 800 years of Muslim presence and dominance). It is not true that all the colonies or conquest have been the same. They are all different. The ferocity of a colony depends on the development of the ethics, spirit or humanity of the conqueror's civilization.
Muslims controlled the south part of Europe but didn’t eliminate Christians, the reason is that Muslims (in contrast with poor and medieval Europe) had a large and long intellectual tradition (the numbers that we use today are called Arabic numbers (which proves the intellectual development of Arabic civilization)). China among so many other important discoveries and inventions had already sailed the Pacific Ocean and almost all the seas by the XV century. Asian travelers (Polynesian) and particularly Chinese, with boats at least four times bigger than the European boats that sailed America until 1492 had already met with American civilizations without invading their lands (Dussel, 1995), on the contrary there is enough evidence to believe that Chinese and other Asian civilizations had commercial and diplomatic exchanges with the American civilizations (Dussel, 1995).
By the middle age of Europe, China had already mapped the world. It was actually thanks to China that the Italian Vatican got the first maps that later took Spain and Portugal to America (which Europeans believed was India, this is why Native Americans are called Indians (Native Americans defined as Indians by Europe is just one of the infinite absurdities and the first step to define “the other” globally and officially since the oppressor’s perspective)). Before the “Discovery of America” Latin Europe remained isolated by the Turkish Muslim world which extended its geopolitical domination from Morocco to Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Mogul Empire of northern India, the mercantile kingdoms of Melaka and finally, in the thirteenth century to Mindanao Island in the Philippines. Thus, Muslim “universality” reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Latin Europe was a secondary,
peripheral culture and never the “center” of the history. This also applied to the Roman Empire, which, given its extreme western location, never became the center of the history of the Euro-Afro-Asian continent (Dussel, 1995).
Therefore this peripheral hungry and undeveloped Latin European civilization arrived to America. The genocide and the unfairness of the colony it is impossible to understand if one just stayed with what we all know (official history produced by the colonizers or the media). However the truth is always there, easy to find if one reflects for a second, unlearn what has to be unlearnt and really wants to see. A death toll of 95 million Native Americans has been documented by the authors D.E. Stannard, author of American Holocaust, D.E. Stannard has said, "The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world."
According to Necrometrics, by as early as the 16th century, the Native American death toll had already reached an estimated 60 million. Nowadays there are only around 5 million Native Americans left in the United States (Navajo Times). The Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas (as many others) wrote openly about this terrible genocide in his time. In 1561, Bartolomé de las Casas, wrote that Spanish colonists had slain 12 million men, women and children in 40 short years. (A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolomé de las Casas 1552). Unfortunately, there are still people and even historians who wish or simply get paid to engage in denial. A common myth is the effort to blame the massive death toll exclusively on diseases brought by the European invaders. Many Native Americans did die of European diseases. However, there is a very convenient effort to ignore the fact that all too many of these people became vulnerable to disease when their essentials of life were either stolen or disrupted by the invaders. Besides, the campaigns of direct and indirect genocide certainly killed millions all by itself.
After the genocide America was disguised as a historical reality differentiated from the European and assimilated and explained with the categories of the Conqueror. The otherness will be denied. The now Indian will not be considered "other", other than the system. Nor recognized from his own worldview: his valuations, his gods and his mental structures. It will be the worldview of Spanish and later British and French in the very North of America what will incorporate the Native American’s new world. The new rulers in America after the independence were the first Europeans born in America (mestizos or creoles) but never the Native Americans, and in the case of North America the Natives were so diminished (very few left) that not even mestizos or creoles rule the new states but the Europeans that claimed themselves Americans after generations.
animals, etc.” After more than three hundred years of massacre, labor and sexual exploitation, torture and all kind of abuses. Native Americans have resisted colonization (European ideology) until our days, fighting for their lives, territory, culture, languages, beliefs and freedom. But some of us (overall the mestizo (sons or daughters of Spanish or mestizo rapist and Indian or mestizo mother)) couldn’t resist the terrible future of an eternal resistance and in order to remain safe and alive (even in the worst conditions) didn’t have any other option that “convince” themselves of the discourse and ideology imposed by the oppressor (what we now call “official history”).
III. A PORTRAYAL OF THE CULTURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL USA ALIENATION OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN’S GENUINE IDEOLOGY IN “NATIVE AMERICAN” ELIAS BOUDINOT’S SPEECH: “AN ADDRESS TO THE WHITES”
In this part I will analyze: “An Address to the Whites”, a famous speech delivered by Elias Boudinot in Philadelphia on May 26, 1826. The aim of this analysis is to unveil the colonialist discourse that it reproduces. This kind of narrative it is a good example of the type of discourse that it is used as a tool by the USA government to minify and justify physical and cultural genocide of Native Americans. First at all I will start by addressing the author and historic context of this speech (that became narrative after being published). Elias Boudinot of the Cherokee Nation made this speech during a time of chaos between the Native Americans and The United States government. Boudinot’s efforts were quite successful in acquiring the funds needed for the purchase of a printing press that later facilitated the creation of the first Native American, bilingual paper: the Cherokee Phoenix.
Two years after this speech, a called “Indian Removal Act” was signed into law. According to the official history, the election of Andrew Jackson as a President of the United States began the Cherokee removal era (which actually started since Europeans stepped on America, later treaties and pacts with Natives were always broken by British and later by The United States government (even if they were made by corrupted chiefs of tribes that collaborates with the USA government they (native chiefs) were also betrayed. “Treats” and “pacts” with Natives Americans or with any other civilization who belongs to the “zone of non-being” (Fanon, 1967) were and are strategies to make up the fact that none oppressor has never asked Natives for their opinion or agreement to occupy their land. Precisely because of the racist and global hierarchy of superiority and inferiority along the line of the human that have been politically, culturally and economically produced and reproduced for centuries by institutions of the “capitalist western-centric/Christian-centric modern/colonial world-system” (Grosfoguel, 2011).
People classified above the line of the human are recognized socially in their humanity as human beings and,
therefore, enjoy access to rights (human rights, civil rights, and labor rights), material resources, and social recognition to their subjectivities, identities, epistemologies and spiritualties. The people below the line of the human are considered subhuman or non-human; that is, their humanity is questioned and, as such, negated (Grosfoguel, 2011). In the latter case, the extension of rights and all kind of recognition is denied. So Boudinot who have been completely colonized by the USA system (ideologically), for instance changed his original name Gallegina to a very European name Elias Boudinot. He studied in mission Schools. Boarding schools are another important example in the concept of cultural genocide. The boarding school program implemented for Native American youth across the USA in the late nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, were described in detailed by author David Walles, he gives a detailed account of how the boarding school system, geography, curriculum and philosophy pursued to systematically dismantle Native children's cultural upbringing. Walles provides an important context for the statement by Richard Henry Pratt (founder of the Pennsylvania Carlisle Indian School), that his goal was to "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." Through this work we can clearly see the United States' attempts to assimilate Native peoples through childhood education which will later result in “Native Indians” reproducing the so called Euro-American ideology.
great sign of improvement: “… volumes of good books; and 11 different periodical papers both religious and political, which were taken and read… Most of the schools are under the care and tuition of Christian missionaries, of different denominations, who have been of great service to the nation, by inculcating moral and religious principles into the minds of the rising generation. . . . It may be said with truth that among no heathen people has the faithful minister of God experienced greater success, greater reward for his labor, than in this. He is surrounded by attentive hearers, the words which flow from his lips are not spent in vain”. “The Cherokees have had no established religion of their own, and perhaps to this 80 circumstance we may attribute, in part, the facilities with which missionaries have pursued their ends. They cannot be called idolaters; for they never worshipped Images…” When Boudinot refers to the Cherokee Nation he says, “…she pleads only for assistance to become respectable as a nation, to enlighten and ennoble her sons, and to ornament her daughters with modesty and virtue.” This language clearly highlights rationalized stereotypes, the dependent Indian and his salvation through the generosity of the white people. He will go as far as to ask: “When before did a nation of Indians step forward and ask for the means of civilization? The Cherokee authorities have adopted the measures already stated, with a sincere desire to make their nation an intelligent and a virtuous people, and with a full hope that those who have already pointed out to them the road of happiness, will now assist them to pursue it.”
Boudinot will also talk about a Cherokee government which last objective is to reproduce The United States council by abolishing the Cherokees traditions considered immoral or uncivilized by The USA legal system: “Polygamy is abolished. Female chastity and honor are protected by law…” It is pretty obvious that Boudinot considers Cherokees’ original organization, costumes, traditions and beliefs inferior to the whites’ but he emphasizes the fact that Cherokee are able to progress in this matter (as they were already doing) (in the sense that they were already getting closer to the USA religion, law, costumes and culture): “The Government, though defective in many respects, is well suited to the condition of the inhabitants. As they rise in information and refinement, changes in it must follow, until they arrive at that state of advancement, when I trust they will be admitted into all the privileges of the American family”. The text is full of examples that prove that Boudinot didn’t have a good outlook or any respect to the ancient organization of the Cherokee before the arrival of the whites: “Are they not indeed glorious, compared to that deep darkness in which the nobler qualities of their souls have slept. Yes, methinks I can view my native country, rising from the ashes of her degradation, wearing her purified and beautiful garments, and taking her seat with the nations of the earth”. We can find also a visible contrast in the language that Boudinot uses when he remarks about the Cherokees and the white members of his audience. He adopts white vocabulary and ideology to refer to his own people as savages in need of civilizing. He calls his people “ignorant,”
wandering in the darkness of barbarity. The word “improved” is used many times, illustrating the distance between the original Cherokee condition and the current state on the road to white perfection. To white humanitarians, he appeals for a printing press that would be used to educate and improve the Cherokee. In contrast, the language in his argument regarding the potential white readership has a very different tone. Boudinot states that, “such a paper could not fail to create much interest in the American community” in a way that would have a “powerful influence on the advancement of the Indians themselves.” He continues by regarding the white audience as sympathetic philanthropists whose search to help the Indians could only be strengthened with an educational paper. In fact, he even goes so far as to address the whites as if they were gods. “I ask you, shall red men live, or shall they be swept from the earth?” as if to say that the lives of the Cherokee rest solely in the hands of these white listeners. He even suggests that by helping the Cherokee “complete her civilization” the white influence may help other nations be saved from their savage ways.
IV. CONCLUSION
The voices of the Native Americans, Black, Asians, etc. That we will generally hear in the institutions are the voices of those who subjectively adopted a white man’s attitude or ideology. We will hear a complete replica of the dominant’s ideology (with different nuances). But very exceptionally we will hear or read someone from the zone of non-being. The inhabitants of the zone of non-being (“This zones are not a specific geographical places, but rather a position within racial structures of domination that operate at a global scale between centers and peripheries, but that are also manifested at a national and local scale against diverse groups considered as racially “inferior” (Grosfoguel, 2002)) have been intentionally erased and denied by the socioeconomic political structure, “allowing” “the nobodies” (black, natives, etc.) to build their own civilization under the conditions and the authority of the “matrix of power” (Anibal Quijano, 1991).
Cherokees were the only privileged tribe with one article in the constitution in the 19th century, that they practiced slavery and also the fact that many of the members of these tribes look totally white like Elias Boudinot, or they (the Five Civilized Tribes) were so corrupted with Saxon American ideology and colonized through generations that the chiefs (but not the whole civilization) managed to maintain stable political relations with the Europeans and Anglo-Americans. Either way, the point is that the narratives that globally represent the Native American narrative are the creation of the most colonized men among the Native Americans. Native American narrations promoted by the USA public and cultural institutions are and were used as tools to minify, justify and covered the ideological, cultural and physical genocide of the Native Americans.
REFERENCES
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